Countdown to a HUGE Surprise!

[Dragonfire]

Does it write OXPs for you? Well, yes, in a way.

Does it involve coding OXPs? Yes.

[RyanHoots]

Is it a text editor made for OXPing?

[Dragonfire]

Nope.

[RyanHoots]

Does the program/script use a GUI?

[Dragonfire]

Yes it does.

[RyanHoots]

Is it like a text editor? Does it edit plists?

[Dragonfire]

No, it is not a text editor.
Yes, it edits (or more specifically works with) plists.

[Capt. Murphy]

Is it an app that parses installed shipdata.plist's and displays the installed ships with their stats and allows those stats to be edited?

[Dragonfire]

No, but you're very VERY close. (Possible eventual feature?)

[Thargoid]

Is it a tool to check the validity of OXPs (I could use one of those)?

We already have that...

oolite.exe -verify-oxp ../AddOns/<yourOXPnamehere>

from the command line when in the oolite.app folder (at least under Windows it's that syntax - for other OS's it's something along the same lines).

It doesn't check everything, but it can save a lot of time in running and log-checking.

[Capt. Murphy]

No, but you're very VERY close. (Possible eventual feature?)

Mmm - guessing that displaying the ship graphically is the difficult part - it just lists the ships and stats and allows editing. Or maybe you select and load an individual shipdata.plist and can edit it from a GUI.

[Dragonfire]

Okay, you guys are very close. One more right guess, and I'll probably just tell ya'll.

But no, it doesn't edit existing OXPs.

[Capt. Murphy]

So an app that will create a brand new shipdata.plist based on stats input via a GUI?

If so - very nice idea.

[Dragonfire]

YES!

The application is named Drydock. It is a cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux program written in Python and WxWidgets.

It allows the user to create objects by type (player ship, NPC ship, station, asteroid, missile, etc.), and then the program shows all the relevant fields (and none of the irrelevant ones). These are sorted by type, with multiline text boxes for adding in scripting, etc.

All the data is stored in small database files until the user is ready to compile the project (consisting of any number of objects) into an OXP, at which point the referenced models, textures, and scripts are copied into their appropriate files, and shipdata, shipyard, and demoships are written automatically and placed in their folders.

Less typos, less oversights. This will change how we OXP forever.

The concept can also be carried over to missions and equipment, obviously, too. We may eventually also add in an import functionality for editing existing OXPs, though that is not something that I will deliver on in the ALPHA.

I will give warning, though, I only have until Friday to deliver on this. At that point, everything I have will be posted to a Sourceforge site, and my activity on the project will drop down to just about nothing for quite some time. I really have to focus most of my efforts on my company. Drydock is just the means by which I am learning wxpython (independent of a tutorial).

So, anyone familiar with (or who are willing to learn) Python 2.7 and WxPython (the python build of wxWidgets) are encouraged to join the project, so we can keep upgrading it.

[another_commander]

Nice. My only reservation would be about the name. Is your project related to this one by Ahruman?

http://drydock.berlios.de/

Maybe it would be an idea to somehow differentiate the name to avoid potential confusion.